Professor James currently holds the Leonard P Ullmann Chair in Molecular Systems Biology and he is the Domain Leader for Biology at the Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney. Professor James has made major contributions to our understanding of insulin action. In the late 1980s he published a series of journal articles in Nature describing the identification and characterization of the insulin responsive glucose transporter GLUT4. Professor James then focused his efforts on unveiling the cellular and molecular control of insulin-stimulated glucose transport. He has also made contributions in the area of SNARE proteins, signal transduction and more recently in systems biology. He has won several awards including the Glaxo Wellcome Medal for Medical Research and the Kellion medal for outstanding contributions to Diabetes research. In 2007 he was elected as a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. He was awarded the NSW Premier Prize in Excellence in Medical Biological Sciences in 2016 and was selected as an honorary doctor at the University of Copenhagen in 2019. He is on the editorial board of a number of prestigious journals and he is regularly invited to speak at key international meetings on diabetes and metabolism.

Dr Magda Montgomery is a senior lecturer in the Department of Anatomy and Physiology, University of Melbourne, and previous NHMRC ECF and NHMRC CDF. Dr Montgomery leads an innovative research program aimed at understanding how defects in lipid metabolism and the endocrine function of the liver drive progression of liver disease and type 2 diabetes. Dr Montgomery received her PhD at the University of Wollongong in 2011, and her postdoctoral training in the area of obesity, insulin resistance and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) at the Garvan Institute in Sydney, at the University of New South Wales, and at Monash University. In 2018, Dr Montgomery moved to the University of Melbourne, where she is currently investigating links between perturbations in liver homeostasis and the development of type 2 diabetes.

Professor Mark Febbraio is a National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia Research Investigator and the Head of the Cellular and Molecular Metabolism Laboratory within the Drug Discovery Program at Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Monash University Australia. He is also the Founder of the recently incorporated company Celesta Therapeutics. His research is focussed on understanding mechanisms associated with exercise, obesity, type 2 diabetes and cancer and his aim is to develop novel drugs to treat lifestyle related diseases. He has authored over 280 peer reviewed papers in leading journals and has over 50,000 career citations. Throughout his career, he has won many prestigious awards including the A K McIntyre Prize for significant contributions to Australian Physiological Science (1999), the Kellion Award for the Australian Diabetes Society (2017), The Eureka Scientific Prize (2020), The GSK Award for Research Excellence (2020), The Endocrinology Society UK International Medal (2021) the Kirsten and Freddy Johansen Rigshospitalet International Award, Denmark (2022) and The Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Monash University Award for Excellence in Research (2022).

Professor Leonie Heilbronn from the University of Adelaide leads the Obesity and Metabolism group based within the Lifelong Health Theme at SAHMRI, where she is also Deputy Director of the Nutrition and Gut Health Program. Her research investigates key regulators of chronic diseases: including caloric restriction, meal timing, fasting, circadian rhythms and the synergistic pathways through which these create a platform for lifelong health. She has contributed extensively to current concepts in caloric restriction, intermittent fasting and time restricted eating in humans. Prof Heilbronn has published > 140 peer-reviewed manuscripts with >14,5K citations. She is President of the Australia and New Zealand Obesity Society (ANZOS), and she is an Associate Editor for Obesity and the European Journal of Endocrinology.